


Once I Met All Of You, I Sang.

by winterbridge



Category: Fire Emblem: Soen no Kiseki/Akatsuki no Megami | Fire Emblem Path of Radiance/Radiant Dawn
Genre: CW for the following themes:, Depression, Gen, Self-Hatred, Starvation, Tellius Week 2020, also implied (one-sided) Shinon/Titania depending on how you want to read it, because all of them do get some lines, hunger, implied (one-sided) Rhys/Titania
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-28
Updated: 2020-08-28
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:07:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26158543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/winterbridge/pseuds/winterbridge
Summary: [ Rhys PoV, pre-PoR ] He no longer prayed for gratitude, but for absolution.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 20





	Once I Met All Of You, I Sang.

_  
Resound around the world_

_Oh Hallelujah that I sing,_

_Just so that one day,_

_You may smile again._

riverP  
  


* * *

  
He is 8, and when he comes back from the playground, there is no telling whether he is crying, coughing or vomiting.

"Rhys, little boy, oh, what have—" His father is positively frantic, not knowing what to do with his small, frail son other than to pat him on the back to try and get the heaving to subside. "Hush, hush, my boy! Come, hush, or you will—!"

Much to his fear, Rhys stills on a sudden choking sound

and then loudly begins to wail.

It takes both parents (his mother now joint in, too) a while of fussing, huddling and cradling to let him breathe again. They put him on the couch, with a plaid around his feeble shoulders and his tiny, shaking hands clawed into the checkered fabric as they soothe his hair and dry his cheeks to little avail of the continuous stream of tears almost bigger than his body.

He falls asleep, with his frazzled little head upon the armrest, but not before he's told them both, in a voice as thin as his brittle arms, that the other children shoved him off the playground but firstly all around it because he _always messes up_ and he now cannot come play with them anymore.  
  


* * *

  
He is 12, and the ceiling of his bedroom has become the entire marker of his existence.

A fly buzzes loudly against his inner window. The heat of the summer has gripped the air, has gripped their house, has gripped everything within its sweltering palm except for the inside of his body and his clammy, shivering limbs. His back aches, and his ears, filled with the unending, desperate droning of the bug slamming its lame body uselessly against the glass in the futile hope that it may free itself.

It's an anguish that he recognizes.

Whenever he stops hearing it, an even greater cold grips around his heart. It is as if every deafening pause of the struggle foretells his own fate; his lack of a future divined by an insect hammering its brain against the pane until it can no more.

He has not the strength to get up and let it out.

Maybe both of them will die within this room.

His eyes well up at the sickening thought that perhaps it came here to feast.  
  


* * *

  
He is 16, and has come to realize he's the reason his parents do not eat.

"Here, darling—"

His eyes are firmly fixed upon his plate, his hands armoring it as he ignores the approach of his mother's ladle. "... It's fine. I don't want it."

The spoon inches on. "Come now, you—"

"— I SAID I DON'T WANT IT!"

The kitchenware rinkles and then comes to a deadly silence. His plate stands still between his clutched and trembling hands. He knows that they both look at him, even with his hot and watering eyes boring right into the meal that's set before him, already little and yet somehow more than his mother and his father eat together.

"... Young man," His father tries, though without the strength and character to consummate his threat, "Talking like that, to your mother …"

She has a different approach. "— Rhys, sweetling, _you_ still have to grow—"

It takes all of him not to scream again. "— What FOR?! What am I even going to grow INTO?!"

He gives them no quarter to answer his question: he simply scrapes his chair back, and grabs onto his serving. "... Thank you for cooking. I'm not hungry."

Both of them weakly splutter and protest as he empties his portion of the meal into two halves on their plates, and then beelines out the kitchen after clattering the empty dish within the sink.

He locks himself within his room, giving them the chance to feel the comfort of a life without him.

If there existed as little of him as they had food upon their plates, they would be so much happier.  
  


* * *

  
He is 20, and, still without work, must feast off of others like a ghoul would.

He'd rather become a silent carcass than have them die for him, though.

"Please, surely you must have something — !"

The harvest is approaching, with its bounty and its bustle, and overhead, the gates of Samhain loom.

They've barely anything to feed themselves, much less for offerings to ghosts.

"I just told ya, yer out of luck!" Brusquely rebuts the farmer.

Third time's a charm, and charms are much of what they need if they wish to survive the wiles of the coming Aos Sí. "But — !"

He's cut off at the first sign of sprouting, like he's a common weed. "— 'n even if me men were not enough, I couldn't do a dime with a lad like you!"

Rhys goes silent.

"Look at ye." The man snorts, and then stomps him spade into the ground. "Yer so bony, I could's well dig up me late pops and put 'im to work f'aye needed hands that badly."

He would have laughed if his skin sat not so taut along his bones indeed. "... I'm very sorry for disturbing you."

"Gedda move on, son. I've work to do."

His coin purse whispers emptily with the whimpering of banshees as he goes home.

At least a skeleton like him need not fear the dead so much.  
  


* * *

  
His parents always told him he was their blessing from the Dawn Herself. They prayed on every morning, against the seeming hopelessness of their ever empty cradle, and were at last gifted a boy with morning-colored hair when age should no longer have let them bear children. And Rhys had taught himself to always thank Her, first upon opening his eyes, for granting his dear parents' wish simply for believing.

Ignorance was bliss.

He still prayed every morning, every evening, and sometimes in the afternoon when an overwhelming sense of guilt threatened to take him in its maw. In religion, he tried to find relief. He read books and scrolls and scriptures, learning of the one-time anger of their Goddess, ever benevolent and kind, whereby she'd drowned and smitten humanity only at their height of vanity. And the more he learned, the more he fell and fell and fell upon his knees: by his bedside, in the chapel, at a clearing in the woods where he could weep within the early sunbeams without his parents hearing his grief.

He no longer prayed for gratitude, but for absolution.

_Please. They meant it not. They were desperate._

_I beg of you_ _— Oh, just, please! —_ _... will you not understand?_

He is not a blessing. He is a curse of famine upon two benighted, hungering souls who craved what was never meant for them.  
  


* * *

  
Still he spends his next years in prayer. The anger, the indignance, and the jealousy he feels, they all still when he speaks within his heart — even if She might not listen to a wretched child like him.  
  


* * *

  
There is no hum about the forest today, and it makes his hairs stand on end.

The woods are usually kind to him. He is a careful man, and has learned where to avoid and where to harvest: berries, mushrooms, medicinal herbs. He turns them into packages and potpourri and into potions, which wandering merchants and sometimes generous townsfolk take so he needn't take from the plate of his parents as they've never stopped making him do. Even particular requests, he now knows how to fulfill, and it is with one of those on a short slip of orders awaiting him at home that he has traveled further than the path for his wild parsley.

Even so, he finds himself aware unusually much of the lustrous flickering within the darkly rustling canopy, and tense with every little crunch the leaves its shed make below his boots. He does not like to think there are dangers and there are wrongs in a place he knows so well —

But as he turns around an oak, he finds that there most certainly is one.

Upon the carpet that the woodland knits for its denizens to walk on lies one who does not belong here. The metal of their armor blinks blotchily within the incandescence of the freckled forest light, and the brown of the withering floor cushions around them like the soil yearns to be their bed. A billowing sunset ocean of red hair is sprayed out around them

and there is no telling where the hair ends and the blood starts.

He clasps his hand across his mouth, not knowing whether he wants to scream or throw up.

"— _oh Sweet Lady_ —"

His basket would have clattered if there not were moss. Instead, it tumbles, herbs flying every which way as it takes flight from his frantic arms flapping towards the figure. _She_ , he can see now, is motionless from limbs to chest, and as his own heart begins to loudly drum within his ears, he reaches for a pulse within her neck.

When he draws back to see his blood-coated hands, the dancing black that often overtakes him begins to fleck along his vision.

_Oh Goddess, oh no, oh Dear Dawn, I cannot_ _—_

>> DRRRRRR. <<

The arrow drills into the trunk behind him. Suddenly, his ear grows hot, and there is a raindrop trickle along the outer curve of it. It has been dry today, however, so the trees could not have shed.

He feels like he is going to pass out.

"— Get the fuck away from her."

He can barely see the archer. It's as if shadow tries to eat them, caressing long arms along every edge of their silhouette until they are but a blur of shade and angles. Only the bow do the long fingers leave untouched, and it is nocked and ready.

"— Please!" He tries, dizzied and choking and weak. Raising his hands, he can feel the hot gore dripping into his sleeves; it makes him feel even fainter. "—Please, I'm — I'm a priest — I just — !"

"Get the **FUCK** away from her or I WILL — !"

"— Shinon!!"

There is so loud a rush within his ears that he heard not the imminent arrival of the panting, clanging armor that sprawls from the bushes. Out from above it sprouts the sweating, red-cheeked head of a blond and blue-eyed man, whose magnified exhaustion immediately dissipates for shock when he casts those eyes upon the completely still body in the undergrowth. "Oh, **shit** — !"

Their tense stalemate is carved to discombobulation by a sudden, loud neigh.

Rhys takes it. He needs to move, he needs to breathe, he needs to, at the very least, look away from all of this, and so his wobbling legs try press upwards from their kneel towards the mildly panicked horse abreast from them to help, help, somehow _help_ —

but he doesn't get to.

" **YOU** STAY THE FUCK WHERE YOU ARE!"

"Shinon _, Shinon_!" He hears the other chant again, in between his rising urge to cry. "Shinon, that's not one of them, that's just a civilian!"

"Oh yeah?! _Really_?! In this goddessdamned leg of the woods?! You tell me what the fucking hell is civilian is doing out in the middle of the blasted — !"

"— _Herbs_ —!" He hates the sound of his own voice as it reflexively squirts out. It's not even a squeak; hardly a whistle; nothing but a single note of absolute panic and fear. "... _Herbs_! …"

Somehow silenced, they both stare at him incredulously. He knows not whether it is from his claim or because they cannot make out any words from the thin noise that squeezes from his throat. He cannot blame them for either.

Swallowing hard, he tries again.

"I was — _herbs_ — my basket — ! ..." He makes the vague and frantic gesticulations of an escaping bird, motioning behind to where his harvest has been dropped and strewn. "— _Please_ ," is his second attempt with the word, "I — I'm a healer, I only — I could — !"

"... ... _Bah_!"

For a moment, he fears the worst from that unfamiliar reaction, as with the single spit of it the archer steps from the shadows at long last.

When he raises his hand, though, it's not to pull the string, but to point at his companion. "Get the fucking horse!"

Rhys is near weeping, in both relief and in distress, but the commandeering man's glare then casts upon him and promptly turns his tears to stone.

"You. You show where we're going.

And you better not be playing fucking tricks with me."  
  


* * *

  
They bring her in with three. The other two that are his parents immediately go abumble; his mother clearing out (the ways, the halls, his room), his father gathering every cloth and wipe and towel he can find — for his son's hands and ear, too.

Deafened by the situation, he still hears the broader of the two in a buzzing mumble of _Captain_ and _Hang in there_ and _You're gonna be okay_.

The taller one says not a word as soon as they are inside. His narrow, arid eyes simply _tick-tock_ like a metronome within his head, assessing his surroundings as if this is the new battlefield and _he_ at least means to make it out alive.

Their house is small, so they put her where he would have slept. There are little other beds to lay her, and it's not as he himself will sleep tonight.

As her companions remove the ornate armor she is still encased in (he would not know how to — they are all farmfolk here), a still comes over him. Never has he seen wounds worse than cuts of shears, and those strike not in the abdomen. If there's nothing he can do, she is his fault now; or she maybe already has become, because there's no-one else.

When she's been bedded and and been toweled, he empties the room save for him and his mistake, and closes the door behind them.

It is deep in the night when he emerges.

"... She will make it."

And he collapses to the wall.  
  


* * *

  
His mother (oh dear mother, to have seen this at her age) has set him in a chair, before a bowl of soup. Between the patchy snoring from the living room (" _Gatrie_ ", he's learned, has taken to the couch), she whispers the praise of her darling son, of his bravery and talent and his helpfulness.

He would dispute, recalling the burning of his eyes and throat merely at the turmoil of the early afternoon, but her hands already tremble without him adding to her grief.

He catches her counting.

"... Are you alright, mother?"

She scuffs back and forth a bit, and then gives in to his perceptive eye. "Oh sweetheart ... Will we feed her enough, you think? We could not make her more ill, but if we don't help her recover …"

Quiet as the wakening of wings, he rises to cup her shoulder, and then to hold her awhile. "It's alright, mother. I still have a few fresh bundles for when the peddler comes tomorrow. The Hadleighs have complained of ails, and would give some coin for it ... and it's the bramble season, is it not?"

Below his chin, her hair is thin and the color of a hearth gone cold. Long ago it was of winter's warm flame, just like his own. The heat of it faded before he was even born, however, and so he has no memory of it. Still, he thinks, as he pulls back and smiles among his heart-deep weariness, he can imagine it exactly when he looks upon the field of freckles scattered between her liver spots.

"I'm sure they'll love your wildberry pie."

Her deep sigh tells him that she loves him.

"— Oh, you're such a gentle boy. And you're so right, Rhys. I fret overmuch, don't I? We'll make do." She returns to her stove with shuffling feet, and begins to pour a large mug from her pan. "Here, will you bring this to our guest? The one with the keen eye. He's checking on her, the poor girl, and I don't think he's eaten yet …"

As he accepts the cup in both of his, her hands shake with age and something more; yet in the dim light of their kitchen, he can still see she smiles at him. "We always make do, don't we?"

Soups and stews are easy. They are hot and made with whatever one has around the house, even if there is little.

He does not make it to more than a simper, his expression buried in the kiss he lays upon her forehead. "... That's right, mother. Always."

They can do no more.  
  


* * *

  
When he enters his own room, more low-lit than it is ever, he hears but a single, regular breathing among the two in bed and chair. His own breath nearly seizes in fear of grave misjudgment, until he realizes that the one who barely makes a sound is the disarmed archer.

The man has the heel of his right boot on the tip of his seat, his other leg outstretched with foot against the bed frame. His jawline is pressed, caved in against his knuckles, and he has an unflinching forward stare upon the blanketed woman before him.

It barely shifts when Rhys comes in.

"... _What_?"

He's uncomfortable to look at. His face is cadaverous and gaunt, like rats ever eat him from the inside out, and his arms are stone and sinew, like he tears those from his own bowels first thing in the morning just so he can live the day again.

His thin eyes flicker up, and they are as sharp as the lick of fire on shattered glass.

Rhys offers him the mug in absolute silence. He's not sure what to say to a man like this.

"— I don't need your fucking soup." There is a drawl on his voice that slowly slices skin on its surface, like the blade of a knife carving cleanly around the fins of a fish.

"… I … understand if you don't quite feel hungry in this situation, but please —"

With no further concern for his protests, the man's head snaps back to the bed. "Yeah, don't give me that." And he cuts off the discussion with the same lacerations his every word has left upon his host's heart. "I fucking know an empty pantry when I see one."

As Rhys bows his head and retreats, he feels oddly nauseated at being known.  
  


* * *

  
It takes a while before she wakes, and one even longer before she can sit and speak.

From the first time that she does, he finds she is not what he expected.

Having been told many a story, ones of adventure and accomplishment, the knights in his mind were always of iron: iron of sword, iron of will, iron in their ever unflinching steeliness — all hard and indomitable iron, much unlike he who dreamt of them.

When he enters her room on the first morning of her rousing, however, she turns her head of soft red curls around her cheeks to him, and within the slowly unfurling moment of the golden radiant dawn, her gentle embarrassment makes him rewrite every fairytale he's come across.

He forgets his _good morning_ as much as he forgets to breathe

— so hers comes first.

"I'm sorry. I must have troubled you a lot," she adds in penance, seated in a cradle of two pillows. "Especially you … You're the one who saved me, didn't you?"

"I — Yes — No! — I simply … …" He can't take credit for her comrades' carrying arms, without which he would never have been able to put her abed as this. "… I did very little." Tray with tea and a slice of tart on his arm, he approaches her bedside as he has been doing on the daily. "I'm sorry — No, I mean, I'm — _Rhys_. I'm … Rhys. ... But if you'd rather not —"

"— Rhys!"

He nearly drops everything he's holding.

"— Don't say that about yourself! By how I was feeling when I gave out, I honestly didn't think I was going to make it … I'm sure you did so much and more! Really, I'm very thankful …"

He not yet knows it’s the start of many times she'll call his name henceforth.  
  


* * *

  
Shinon and Gatrie (their names are tacked together so often he began thinking them _Shinun'ngatree_ for a while) have gone on their way ahead, tasked with relaying to their mercenary band the gladdening news that Titania, the patient, fortunately has not died.

Titania (not dead) remains a while.

She's much firmer than she were, and but a few days ago announced her imminent leave to impose on them no longer. His parents doth protest: they've much taken a shine to her resolute but friendly manner, and he's often caught them together on the light exercise of walks he had prescribed to strengthen her, or even in the menial like the combined doing of dishes.

It does not at all surprise him, then, when he passes by the kitchen in the late of morning for a glimpse of all three of them seated at the table. What does catch him off guard is the shred of conversation he comes into.

"— So I would take your son, if you don't mind."

All heads turn at the sudden splutter from the hallway.

"Rhys!" She gets up, her beam turning to worry as he rapidly pats himself upon the chest to dislodge the chunk of startled embarrassment. "Are you alright? We were just talking about …"

"I'm — fine!" He manages, doing his utmost to push back into the cryptic topic they seemed to have been on, its unveiling the only possible cure for his rising fluster. "I'm—"

They have him join them, and make him drink a glass of water before they all resume.

"Titania ... Titania just had a wonderful proposal," His father nods, beginning to explain.

His mother continues not. In her eyes, there is an apprehension, but she simply pours tea with an unfaltering smile.

Titania's is both abiding and an unobtrusive sort of wishful as she pivots and faces him. "— Would you come with me?"

He blanks a little. "... Would I ... ?"

"To join me. To join _us_. As a mercenary.  
  


* * *

  
"— Rhys, you don't have to."

He nearly gets tangled in his bedsheets in surprise. "— Miss Titania!"

She told him just her name was fine, but priests especially cannot shake their habits.

"Oh! I'm sorry. I thought you heard me."

She's beside him with another laundry basket. He would have caught her approach, perhaps, if the sound of his thoughts was not so loud right now.

"You needn't ..." He tries, nodding in shame towards the fresh linen.

"It's the least I can do!" To them, she is a guest; to herself, it is a feeble repaying of an insuperable due. "And I don't mind. Really." She casts a blanket along the line, snagging it with wooden pins. "Ours is much dirtier than this."

_Ours._

He'd gone to reach up along with her, but fades to a halt in the middle of his movements.

_Theirs._

"... You really don't have to, Rhys."

He blinks away from his mind, and turns his head to look at her.

She's standing next to him, a damp plaid upon her arm, and she does not look him in the eye. "... We do need a healer. Very much so. ... And I just thought …"

She knows.

He could tell her. He could tell her that he has no job, no more than the odd one of being called upon for a scrape or a bruise or the cut of a sickle. He could tell her that his parents have no income, and that he's too weak and frail to bring them one himself. He could tell her that their pantry's often empty, and that the wildberry tart she liked so much is make-do, because make-do is all they ever know.

He could tell her. He could tell her that he wants to come, because though his heart is cowardly, it has ever dreamed of adventure. He could tell her that he wants to go, more than anything, because by his leave will mom and dad have coin. He could tell her that he wants to, so he can look after them at last without draining them down the marrow, but that it'd leave not a single pair of eyes to watch over their old and brittle bodies here.

He could tell her.

But she already knows.

His parents have told her everything, and, in that, made his decision.

"... I understand. Really, I understand if you …"

She looks at him, at last. Her eyes are full of guilt — and they absolve him somehow.

"No, I ..." And he plunges. "... I would love to ... Titania."

As the overcast of her remorse promptly breaks away for a sun of wonder and relief, he thinks this may not be his mistake, but the first he has done right within this life.

The thought is absolutely terrifying.  
  


* * *

He, too, has trouble letting her go.

"... Now you be very, very careful," his mother sighs, releasing him after the passing of full minutes. "And if you feel unwell—"

"I know, mother. You needn't fret."

He places a kiss upon her cheek, and another one upon his father's, holding his old, quivering hand a while as he vows to him his safety.

The knight looks on, without a single interruption.

"... I will be going, then."

Titania's arms are very strong (he knows from watching her prepare, in awe, this winter's firewood in the enclosure of their garden — _shame on the son who could not_ ) but he realizes only just how much when she takes his hand and pulls him high onto her horse. He settles behind her, a little dizzied by the mount's height, and in his nervousness forgets his hesitation in wreathing his fearful fingers into the fabrics at her waist.

"Thank you again, for everything." He can hear the mellow smile in the reassurance that she speaks with. "I shall bring him back to you sometime soon. I promise."

His parents fade to waving specks in no time as they set upon the woodward road.

* * *

"We'll rest on the way," She eventually breaks the quiet that has come over them, between the clip and clop of hooves, beneath the green boughs of the forest.

She worries, he realizes, because he's not a rider. "It's alright. We don't need to."

"I insist!" She insists indeed.

It culls the conversation.

She's kind. She's attentive. She's strong and she is capable and she is everything he never managed to achieve. He knows not her parents, but she is a child that would rightly make them proud.

If only she had been the one to have been born to his mother and his father, too.

He sits behind her, so she notices none of the three tears that fall upon the back of his own hand.  
  


* * *

  
As those that are present introduce themselves upon his arrival, he repeats their names in his mind to remember.

Boyd. His palms are large and his grip is firm, two-handed around Rhys' much shyer greeting. He brims, with absolutely everything, to where all around him seem both smaller and protected by the absolute vigor for life he is imbued with.

Oscar. Tall and temperate, there is nonetheless nothing frail about him. His voice and his welcome are pleasantly steady, as if he were, within the water, a stone beacon safe and resolute, unperturbed by both sudden waves and the calm of the stream all around him.

Ike. He is young, and he is blunt, but Rhys has never seen eyes of so much promise. They ignore him not but yet seem to look well beyond him, as if the horizon ever calls the boy and beckons him to greatness waiting.

Shinon and Gatrie are on a mission. The children are away to play. Their tactician is on a regular trip to study at the capital Melior — though, Titania assures him, with a gleam of humor, the warmth of his welcome won't be lacking for the young man's omission.

And then comes the mountain.

Many times in his life has Rhys been afraid. Never has he been so absolutely daunted. The crag of his shadow casts across him, far further and wider than his own, and as he looks up to where the peak cleaves the sky and claims it, he neigh sinks to his knees in reflex of deference.

He is insurmountable.

"Ah. You must be Rhys."

Rhys sinks within the darkened valley from which he thought to look up at the mount. His hand hovers by his chest, unextended in his prompt submission, and he cannot speak a lighter word under the heavy rumble of a god.

And then Father looks him in the eye.

His brow is carved, like the ridge of a mountain. Time and stone and battle have etched themselves into the cliff of his face, chiseled and unmoving, and he looks down upon them all with a stare of stone and rust.

Yet where that gaze lands, the shadows recede.

Before him stands the mountain, whose passage cannot be made; and yet the mountain does not harrow the valley that lays small and reverently at its feet. Its peak cleaves the storm that would have drowned the dale; its back blocks the sun that would have scorched the green; its arms guide down the water that would never have found ground. It ever stands, wordlessly and watching, looking over the children that play within the verdant pastures created by its silent might.

Rhys' feeble touch reaches to lay upon the stone, knowing he must thank it for all it's ever done.

The giant's hand closes around his, and makes him forever a child of the green and guarded vale.

"Welcome. My name is Greil, commander of the Greil Mercenaries. I've heard of your skill. Titania has told me much good."

"Thank you, Commander. I promise I will not let you down."

But then, perhaps, he does.  
  


* * *

  
The first time he falls ill is five days after his arrival. The second is two weeks.

By the third within the month, he sits silently awaiting his dismissal as Commander Greil comes in.

"Rhys."

"Good afternoon, Commander." His smile is one of resignation at a death sentence. Even this he did not right.

He should apologize to Miss Titania; in letter, afterwards, perhaps.

"Ah, you're awake. Good." Even with a sidelong step towards its walls, Greil's physique and presence both fill up the entire room. "I brought some visitors for you."

"— Visitors —?!" It couldn't be his parents. They are elderly, and they cannot make the trip. Or has Greil sent for them, perhaps, so that the trip homewards won't feel so empty and alone?

"—Hey, Rhys!"

His panic is shortly interrupted by a grinning Boyd, who, without further announcement, comes in with the bulldoze of his usual gait. His hands are wrapped in towels, and he's carrying a large, cast iron pan. Rhys recognizes it from the mercenaries' stovetop, but cannot fathom for the life of him why it's being brought into his room.

They aren't _cannibals_ , are they?

"Up at last, huh! You feeling better?"

Before he can answer, another voice cuts through.

"Out like a light — like a real Sleeping Beauty!" Behind Boyd marches in Gatrie, equipped similarly with iron and cloth. "Though, speaking of beauties — Hmm, yesterday, in town — !"

But Rhys hears not the rest of the story. One by one, the mercenaries start spilling in, the clamor ever increasing. Oscar has baskets with bread rolls in his arms; Ike and Mist have their hands full of bowls; a yapping Shinon unfurls a towel full of wooden spoons and forks. They start distributing, themselves along the floor and the kitchenware _among_ themselves, and Rhys is still too hazed to manage even a word of inquiry.

The pans open, and the smell of stew comes drifting out.

Suddenly, his bed creaks, and his mattress dips a bit.

"Rhys!!"

Before him on his blanket, shoeless and clutching something in his tiny fist, sits Rolf upon his knees, absolutely beaming. Even among the frazzle of his fear and lack of comprehension, Rhys' heart lightens a little: the boy had taken to him quickly, but the opposite was equally true.

His chest immediately tightens again, though, knowing they might now say goodbye already.

"Hello, Rolf. What did you come here for?"

"—I got something for you!!"

His small, furled hand extends, wordlessly begging for Rhys' palm. He does as asked, and feels a round weight drop into his palm. Looking more closely, he is now the owner of a particularly smooth, pinstriped brown pebble.

"—I whispered _aaaall_ of my well-wishes into it," Rolf explains, visualizing the amount of those with his spread arms, "so if you carry that around, you never have to be sick again!"

"Rocks don't _heal_ people, you peewee-brain!" yells Boyd from the floor.

"— _You're_ a peewee!" Rolf protests.

"A very small one," Oscar adds nonchalantly.

In the corner, Shinon snorts.

" _Ugh_ , you're so childish, Boyd!" Mist berates, her feet dangling off the bed.

"Yeah, and you have a rock for a _head_ ," argues Ike, cross-legged opposite her.

Soren says nothing, and divines his next victim in the shapes of the potato chunks within his bowl.

"Speaking of heads!" Gatrie interjects, swirling his stew-splattering spoon about to gain attention, "yesterday, in town, I saw—!"

"—Seriously!" Titania, equipped with two servings in hand, gives a sigh that borders on a groan. "I should start grounding all of them ..." There is, however, a fondness to her as she looks across the squabbling squadron, almost as if she struggles to hold back a smile. "Really, though ... I'm sorry, Rhys. Since you've been all alone in bed, we thought to have dinner here together, but —

**Rhys**?!"

Her startled yelp snaps all their heads.

He can't help it. Even as tens of arms reach out for him and Greil looks on, he can't help it.

He can't stop himself from sobbing loudly, nestled between this new family.

( _I would die for all of you_. )  
  


* * *

  
He opens his eyes to the tune of the dawn.

In a year, nothing changes; and yet everything does.

Rhys slings his legs out of his bed, and softly rubs his eyes. The light is blue and golden; the birds chitter with a lilt that not yet wakes their neighbours. He sorts his two blankets, he straightens his pillow, and then loosely dons his outer robe atop his sleepwear.

It is early, still, and the morning beckons him to a walk hand-in-hand with his own thoughts.

When he comes out of them, he suddenly finds that he is late.

"—I'm very sorry—!"

Upon the field of his arrival, he finds everyone already gathered, looking on as he comes to roost among them in an end to his hurried flutter.

"Rhys! Thank goodness, I just thought to check up on you …"

"Good morning, Rhys. Did you sleep well?"

"Hey, sure ain't like you to be late! Good dreams?"

"Hoho! I have to say, I had a very good —"

"Nobody fucking _cares_ , Gatrie."

"I do! I want to know what everyone dreamt!"

"I don't think you want to know about Gatrie's, Rolf …"

"Yeah, it's very _girly_. Just like Mist's."

"... If we're all gathered and you're done squabbling, I would like to start the briefing."

"—Of course. I'm sorry for being late."

And somehow, at the simple quiet of his voice, everyone else seems to settle, too. As Soren begins filing through his papers, clearing his throat in preparation for what is undoubtedly their task division and a lecture both, he has a moment to glance across all of them, singularly and together.  
It makes his entire heart swelter.

He folds his hands together, and then smiles.

"—Hello, everyone. What can I do for you today?"

( _Without a single doubt_. )

**Author's Note:**

> [ Mostly inspired by my rooting through Rhys' Japanese Supports and finding that, especially in the one with Titania, he expressed himself (much) more darkly/negatively about his own condition, even if through implication. We got a wonderful localization, honestly, but I felt it would be good to carry those emotions over to this fic to try add further depth to his character.  
> We'll talk about how much I want to yeet the one responsible for his horrendous localization in /FE:H/ some other time.
> 
> I hope you enjoyed! ]


End file.
